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Art of the Week, March
10, 2011: "Earth's Skin" by Ghanian artist El Anatsui. Many of Anatsui’s sculptures are mutable in
form, conceived to be so free and flexible that they can be shaped in any way and altered in appearance for each installation.
Working with wood, clay, metal, and, most recently, in Earth’s Skin, the discarded metal caps of liquor
bottles, Anatsui breaks with sculpture’s traditional adherence to forms of fixed shape while visually referencing the
history of abstraction in African and European art.
Art of the Week:
January 20, 2013. "God of Some Things" by Pakistan-American Artist Huma
Bhabha. From Karachi, Pakistan, is a sculptor based in New York. Her sculptures are composed from basic construction
media and found objects. In Bhabha’s exhibition “Unnatural Histories” currently being
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, Bhabha’s sculptural works and photo-based drawings feature bodies that appear
dissected and dismembered, but one can likewise view them as monuments to human life reclaimed from the detritus of a post-apocalyptic
landscape.
Art of the Week December 23, 2012:
Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish painter based in Antwerp. In 1600, Rubens travelled to Italy, where he saw paintings
by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. The coloring and compositions of Veronese and Tintoretto had an effect on Rubens's painting,
and his later, mature style was profoundly influenced by Titian. In Florence, he was influenced by the art of Michelangelo,
Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the term 'Rubenesque'
for plus-sized woen. Rubens painted The Adoration of the Magi more often than any other episode from the life of
Christ.
Art of the Week December 16,
2012: Sokari Douglas Camp is one of the first female African artists to have attracted the attention of the European
art market. She was born in the Kalabari town of Buguma in southern Nigeria. At the age of 21, Camp left Nigeria to study
in Oakland, California and at the London Royal College of Art. This
sculpture relates to a contemporary Kalabari masquerade in which water spirits join their worshippers among the world of men.
Art of the Week December 9, 2012: Oscar
Niemeyer Born in Rio de Janeiro, Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (1907 –
2012) was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. He died
on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday. Niemeyer is most famous for the design of the Cathedral of Brasilia,
one of the numerous buildings he designed for the layout of the new capital in the 1960s.
Art of the Week October
15, 2012: Emil Nolde was was one of the first German expressionist painters and printmakers.
He was a member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden
in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. ENolde is known for his vigorous brushwork
and expressive choice of colors. In his works, Nolde articulated his growing dissatisfaction with contemporary Western society,
which he countered with his own idealized concept of the “noble savage”.
Art of the Week September 28, 2012: Candido Portinari was one of the
most important Brazilian painters and also a prominent and influential practitioner of the neo-realism style
in painting. Portinari devoted himself to the realistic portrayal of the life of the common people— Indians, Negroes,
farmhands, and the inhabitants of favelas (slums). He often endowed his figures with a lofty and heroic character.
Representative of the portrayals is "Hill" painted in 1933 and currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
Art
of the Week September 2, 2012: “African Cosmos” with South African artist Gavin Jantjes. Born in Cape
Town, South Africa, Gavin Jantjes completed his B.A. at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town. He left South Africa in 1970
on a scholarship to the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Hamburg, Germany, where he received an M.A. in 1972.
He lived and worked in Hamburg from 1970–82. He has since returned to live in South Africa. The Jantges untitled painting
is on display at the National Museum of Art in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the African Cosmos exhibit.
Art of the Week, August 26, 2012:
Charles Hinman. Charles Hinman (b. 1932) was born and grew up in Syracuse, New York. “Gems” is Hinman's
creation with Gary Lichtenstein, where screen colors are reflected off the wall, thus allowing for the wall and the interstices
to be reconsidered as foreground and ground. As we move, we perceive the work differently: new colors, new facets, new forms,
new shadows, as the work is constantly reinvented. Gems was first presented to the public at the Butler Institute of American
Art, in Youngstown, Ohio, in the Fall of 2011.
Art of the Week, Augyst 19, 2012: James Turrell, an American
artist working with light and space. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden crater. Turrell acquired the Roden
crater in 1979. Located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, Turrell is turning this natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive
naked-eye observatory, designed for the viewing of celestial phenomena.
Art of the Week August
12, 2012: "Mappa" by Italian artist Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti. Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti (1940-1994) was an Italian conceptual artist focusing on contemporary events. Perhaps best
known is Boetti's series of large embroidered maps of the world, called simply Mappa. After the Six-Day War in June
1967, the artist began to collect newspaper covers featuring maps of war zones. Comprising twelve sheets of copper, each engraved
only with the single outline of a map, Dodici forme dal 10 guigno 1967 (Twelve Shapes Starting from 10 June 1967)
(1967-1971) graphically catalogs some of the world's most serious political crises between 1967 and 1971. Boetti’s maps
reflect a changing geopolitical world. Part of the series hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Art of the Week March 11, 2012: Keith
Haring (1958-1990)produced hundreds of public drawings in rapid
rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images
became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway
became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines. In the popular media, Haring developed watch designs for Swatch and an advertising
campaign for Absolut vodka.
Art of the Week March 4,
2012: Amrita Sher-Gill (1913-1941) was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Hungarian mother and a Sikh father. Her
early childhood was spent mostly in Hungary, and in 1921 the family moved to India, where she began her schooling. Amrita's
early work often reflected the academic style in which she was trained. However, she also began to experiment with ways of
representing the non-Western human images. Today, she is considered an important woman painter of 20th century India, whose
legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance.
Art of the Week Feb. 26, 2012: "View of Toledo" by El Greco (1541-1614).
Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (as we know him now) was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish
Renaissance. View of Toledo, is one of the two surviving landscapes painted by El Greco. The other, called View and Plan of
Toledo, lies at Museo Del Greco,Toledo, Spain. Along with Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, landscapes by William Turner,
and works by Monet, it is among the best known depictions of the sky in Western art.
Art of the Week: "George Washington" by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was declared the "Father
of American Portraiture" because he portrayed most of the notable men and women of the Federal period in the United States.
Born in Rhode Island, the artist trained and worked in London, England, and Dublin, Ireland, from 1775 to 1793. He then returned
to America with the specific intention of painting President Washington's portrait.
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Art of the Week,
August 28, 2011: "Humanscapes" by Fernando Ferreira de Araujo, a Brazilian artist also based in
New York City. His paintings are strongly identified by a “bleeding” hallmark with multiple layers of
paint along with deep brush strokes. Ferreira de Araujo had a solo art show, Humanscapes, at the Brazilian Post Office Cultural
Center in October-November 2010. The works displayed in the show find the human figure as a starting point.
.
Art of the Week August 21, 2011: "Travelers Amidst Mountains and Streams" by Chinese
Artist Fan Kuan. Fan
Kuan (990–1020) was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song Dynasty. He is considered among the great masters of China's
the 10th and 11th centuries. Kuan spent his life as a recluse in the rugged Qiantang mountains of Shanxi to base his paintings
on the Taoist principle of becoming one with nature. No biographical details survive about KuanTravelers Amidst Mountains
and Streams, a large hanging scroll, is Kuan's best known work. It became a model for other Chinese artists as a seminal
painting of the Northern Song school. When looking at the painting, the viewer realizes how small he/she is compared to the
big picture of nature.
Art of the Week, August 14, 2011: Graffiti art by English Freehand Artist
Banksy, who Banksy is a pseudonymous England based graffiti artist, political activist, film director and painter.
His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humor with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling
technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities
throughout the world.
Art
of the Week, August 7, 2011: "Hay Wain" by English Romantic Painter John Constable. ‘The Hay Wain’
is based on a site in Suffolk, near Flatford on the River Stour. The hay wain, a type of horse-drawn cart, stands in the water
in the foreground. Across the meadow in the distance on the right, is a group of haymakers at work.
Art of the
Week July 31, 2011: “La Goulue” by French Poster Artist Toulouse Lautrec. In the lithograph “La
Goulue” (1891), Lautrec adapted the fad for Japanese style (asymmetric composition, flat areas of color) that then pervaded
French art to the also burgeoning art of the picture poster. Among those whose images are now a part of art history are the
Moulin Rouge dancers: Louise Weber (La Goulue) and Jane Avril, and the combative singer/entrepreneur Aristide Bruant.
Art of the Week: July 24, 2011: Prakriti: Indian Contemporary Artist S.H. Raza Raza's paintings
revolve mainly around nature and its various facets. He believes the bindu (dot) to be the center of creation and existence
and his works reflect this particular thinking. In his painting Prakirti, the canvas is composed of twenty-five squares,
contains in each of them an image suggesting the essence of the elements present in nature [i.e., prakriti]. The painting
represents Raza’s ideas of colourful forms, contours, and shapes rising from black obscurity. In a visible energy spectacle,
certain fundamental elements are intricately interrelated and determine the nature of form.
Art of the Week July 17, 2011: "Four-sided Pyramid" by American Artist Solomon "Sol"
LeWitt, an American artist considered to be the founder of Conceptual Art and Minimalism. LeWitt’s
“Four-sided Pyramid” was installed in Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art sculpture garden in 1999.
The terraced pyramid is associated with the setback design that had long been characteristic of New York City skyscrapers.
Its geometric structure also alludes to the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia.
Art of the Week July 10, 2011: "The Scream" by Edvard Munch. Painted
in 1893, this is possibly the first Expressionist painting. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety
of modern man. Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized
figure is reduced to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis.
Art of the Week July 3, 2011: "Portrait of a Woman"
by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was best known as a composer and poet and was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize
for literature. When already 60 years old, he began to paint and created a body of work that made him one of South Asia's
great modern painters. For Tagore art and aesthetics were not a peripheral; they were an integral part of the self, facilitating
the recognition of beauty in all aspects of life.
Art of the Week: June 19, 2011: "Relativity by Dutch artist MC Escher. In
the lithograph Relativity, printed in 1953, Escher depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply.
The architectural structure seems to be the centre of an idyllic community, with most of its inhabitants casually going about
their ordinary business, such as dining. The structure has six stairways, and each stairway can be used by people who
belong to two different gravity sources.
Art of the Week June 12, 2011: "La Mariee"
by Marc Chagall. In Chagall's work during all stages of his life,
it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. As well as the symbolic or the metaphorical, there
is the religious dimension to his hybrid animal-human imagery.
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